So-called Men's Rights Groups

aren't really about fairness in divorce and child support issues but are rather vehemently anti-feminist outfits which excuse or even justify domestic abuse.

Convicted killer Darren Mack was one such poster boy for the "men's rights" movement. A rich, spoiled brat who never grew up, he couldn't part with "his" money in order to support his wife and daughter in a divorce settlement. Instead, he stabbed his wife to death and tried to kill Judge Chuck Weller here in Reno. Naturally the case went national, and Mack's involvement in the "men's rights" movement was central to the case. He, too, had the gall to claim "he" was the one who was a "victim" of domestic abuse--by his petite wife. Of course he went to prison anyway.

Meanwhile, the men's rights groups are going political, and that is what the linked article is all about. The author is the same one who has written about the "Quiverfull" movement in the religious right.

Groups like RADAR fall under the broader umbrella of the men’s rights movement, a loose coalition of anti-feminist groups. These men’s rights activists, or MRAs, have long been written off by domestic-violence advocates as a bombastic and fringe group of angry white men, and for good reason. Bernard Chapin, a popular men’s rights blogger, told me over e-mail that he will refer to me as “Feminist E,” since he never uses real names for feminists, who are wicked and who men “must verbally oppose … until our flesh oxidizes into dust.” In the United Kingdom, a father’s rights group scaled Buckingham Palace in superhero costumes. In Australia, they wore paramilitary uniforms and demonstrated outside the houses of female divorcees.

But lately they’ve become far more polished and savvy about advancing their views. In their early days of lobbying, “these guys would show up and have this looming body language that was very off-putting,” says Ben Atherton-Zeman, author of Voices of Men, a one-man play about domestic violence and sexual assault. “But that’s all changed. A lot of the leaders are still convicted batterers, but they’re well-organized, they speak in complete sentences, they sound much more reasonable: All we want is equal custody, for fathers not to be ignored.”

One of the respectable new faces of the movement is Glenn Sacks, a fathers' rights columnist and radio host with 50,000 e-mail followers, and a pragmatist in a world of angry dreamers. Sacks is a former feminist and abortion-clinic defender who disavows what he calls “the not-insubstantial lunatic fringe of the fathers’ rights movement.” He recently merged his successful media group with the shared-parenting organization Fathers and Families in a bid to build a mainstream fathers' rights organ on par with the National Organization of Women. Many of Sacks’ arguments—for a court assumption of shared parenting in the case of divorce, or against child-support rigidity in the midst of recession—can sound reasonable.